Artist - Wafflecakes
Lets kick this one off with one of the hardest categories in fan creation! We have amazing artists and video editors in the fandom (who we get their own shoutouts later), but what about the category that requires skills from both?
Animation is one of the rarest talents we have here in ponyland, with only a handful of people putting the ridiculous amount of time forward to actually learn it, and quadruple that doing it.They deserve all the props!
Below, lets celebrate some animation!
A Celebration of All Things Brony Animation!
(Note: All images are clickable to go view the animation)
Animation came much later in the world of pony creation, primarily due to the time it takes to make some of these. It's not unusual for a 5 minute animation to take a creator months, or even years to tackle.
Sure, we get plenty of short little loops like the gif up above, but brony has something that many fandoms struggle immensely with. Full on animation projects!
These are built from entire teams of people, completely volunteer based with no real reward other than making their fellow pony fans happy. From the background score, to the animators themselves, they drop off episode-length stories that would usually be produced with the backing of a major studio.
Big groups aren't the only ones creating amazing works for us all to watch though! Small teams of two in the case of BrutalWeather do it all themselves with the help of voice actors and actresses to breathe life into it. These guys don't even tease their projects. It's just something you wake up to one day with a show-quality short appearing in your sub box or on our front page.
We've had some rocky moments though. Poor Jananimations still hasn't been able to re-upload some of his classics, which are now hosted by 3rd party channels after legal trouble from Hasbro. Turns out, you can be too good. To the point where the company producing the work you are parodying worries that people will get confused at what is and isn't produced by them.
Speaking of Hasbro, I bet they wish they owned a character is popular as Fluffle Puff here. That's another thing our animation side tends to spawn; completely original fandom icons that basically take on a community of their own.
It doesn't stop at pony though! Dragging cartoon horses along with us to other things we love is a staple of bronyland, and nowhere does it shine better than the animation side. An entire series dedicated to Celestia and Luna playing video games? Of course!
Ponified "The Sims" that I wish EA would come along and pick up as a real game? You bet!
Hell, we even have Alstiff over here creating full on lego-fied pony worlds. Just in case show-style wasn't enough for you.
Anime, games, major movie brands, books, just about everything has seen some ponification love.
Of course, expanding on the show is still one of our favorite past-times, particularly with characters that didn't get a whole lot of love early on.
Celestia and Luna have had a host of major projects released based on their rocky history before the show got around to it. While we did finally get a few glimpses of it in canon, it still didn't come anywhere near how much we delved into the topic of Luna's banishment over the last decade.
While the show was focused primarily on the mane 6, Luna here got more fan love than anyone.
One-shot and incidental characters aside, most of our fandom-adopted backgrounders thrived in this category, with Vinyl and Octavia taking a big chunk of the attention across multiple ideas on how the two would interact with each other in their daily lives.
We also saw a lot of progress in artistic ability, with the Rainbow Dash Presents and Mentally Advanced series being some of the best examples of it. They started off as simple little picture-book style slideshows, and eventually had full on animation in a large chunk of the final ones.
We can't have a post about animation without the memes though! Whether it was the Licious series, or Celestia and her odd correlation with bananas, an internet fandom will inevitably spawn something.
Turns out we were really good at that.
2D isn't the only thing I want to celebrate here though. Thanks to the awesome modelers that brought us the 3d ponies we still use today way back in the day, and Source Filmmaker releasing right as the pony fandom was getting going back in 2012, we've seen a flood of people getting into the 3D game.
Many are short and sweet with silly jokes being the goal, but sometimes bronies come together with armadas of editors all throwing their skills into the ring for projects like the "Doors" series, where over 30 people contributed.
There are plenty of awkward and uncanny animations out there, but animators like Argodaemon absolutely mastered the use of these models. I'm sure I'm not the only one that got a heavy dose of the feels from Remembrance. The silky smooth animation combined with amazing use of particle effects set a scene that I doubt many of us will ever forget about.
And like their cousins over on the 2D side, the ease of finding models already made for other franchises has spawned a whole host of crossovers. The cast of Team Fortress 2 and other Valve characters tended to dominate for years, but plenty of people dove into other concepts with custom costumes like this awesome POPSTARS music video released a few months ago.
These days there are only a handful of regular teams releasing things, but they all have their unique styles and ideas, with the Everfree Team here dropping dance-focused videos consistently.
I could go on forever about how much the animation side of the fandom has made all of our pony-lives better. It's one of my favorite categories, and always leads to a hype-filled moment when I open the submit box and see something labeled "ANIMATION".
So, thank you animators! With the show officially over and Pony Life still a mystery, we are relying on you all more than ever to keep our beloved cartoon horses in motion. Youtube sucks for not paying you all way more for your work over some of these channels that just dump 10 minute nonsense all day, and I hope they one day rectify that. Until then, know that the fandom absolutely loves everything you do for all of us. The pony community wouldn't be anywhere near as awesome without you!
For the rest of you, go marathon some AgrolChannel.
Or have some diabetes from this adorable Pear Butter.
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